So I have finally rid myself of the scourge of iTunes! (crowd goes wild) I’ve managed to cutover my entire collection to Media Monkey. It’s a great piece of software. The best thing I like about it is the ability to keep separate collections, this allows me to keep a folder of music that I listen to on a regular basis and a folder for music that is purely for DJ mixing. There is a big difference in the two types of music and I don’t regularly make a habit of listening to the music that I am blasting off the decks every weekend, so it’s nice to not have it all mixed together. This also gives me the ability to define different auto sort rules for the two file structures, this is great! Because it allows me to sort albums as artist/album/song, and the singles for DJing are stored as genre/year/song in a different location, which is exactly what you need to see when doing a DJ set.
I’ve also managed to integrate the playlists from DJ Decks into the playlists from Media Monkey, giving me a single point of playlist management. But the absolute best thing about this is that Media Monkey allows you to install in portable mode onto a mobile drive. So I have copied ALL of my music on a single 1TB portable drive and can carry it around from dekstop to laptop and take it to gigs with me. Imagine having every single song that you have every heard at your fingertips…. that’s what it feels like now when I do a DJ gig… insane! and it’s all organised, even crazier! The software is skinnable and highly configurable and it can easily sync with your iPOD or phone, which is also what I have managed to do.